Praise for D A N A B N E T T
“Dan Abnett is the master of war.”
SFX
“Embedded is a nail-biting, seat-of-the-pants
ride – which also has serious things to say about
war and the news media – by a master of the
adventure novel.”
Eric Brown
“Rips across the page like a blast wave from a
barrage of low orbit launched kinetic impactors.
Abnett makes hard bitten, high concept mil-fic
fun again.”
John Birmingham
“If there’s one thing Abnett does well, it’s write
a kick-butt action sequence.”
SF Signal
“With a firm grasp of character and a superior
ability to convey action… Abnett delivers a
great, readable science fiction novel and earns
his comparisons to an SF Bernard Cornwell.”
Wertzone
“The cinematic scope and dizzying vision we’re
shown puts most of the recent SF movie epics
into deep shade. Dan Abnett entertains from
the ground up.”
SF Site
“The king of noir-infused military SF.”
Mark Charan Newton

an excerpt from
EMBEDDED
by Dan Abnett
To be published April 2011
by Angry Robot, in paperback
and eBook formats.
UK ISBN: 978-0-85766-090-9
US ISBN: 978-85766-091-6
eBOOK ISBN: 978-0-85766-092-3

Angry Robot
An imprint of the Osprey Group
Distributed in the US & Canada
by Random House
angryrobotbooks.com

ONE
The digital brooch at the throat of his regulation
unitard read Fanciman, Major Gene Gillard, S.O.M.D.,
but from the handshake and greeting it was clear
that the major affected a more mannered pronunciation of his surname, something along the lines of
Funsmun.
He suggested the chair Falk should occupy with
a su casa wave, then resumed his seat at the desk. As
he sat down, he pinched the thighs of his unitard to
hoist up the slack in the legs.
“When did you get here?” he asked.
“Last night,” Falk replied. “I came in by spinrad a
month ago, but I’ve been in acclimation out on the
Cape for twenty days.”
“You won’t have seen much of Eighty-Six yet,
then. You’ll discover it’s fine country, Mr Falk. Beautiful country.”
“Country worth fighting over?” Falk asked. He
meant it lightly.
Major Fanciman favoured him with an expression
5

6

EMBEDDED

of distaste, as though Falk had just skilfully farted the
first few bars of the Settlement Anthem.
“Did I say something wrong?” asked Falk.
Fanciman prepared and lit a smile, slowly and
expertly, like it was a Corona Grande.
“We are very conscious of vocabulary, Mr Falk.
The word you used has negative connotations. It’s,
uhm, sensitivity-adverse. I’m not blaming you, God
knows. You only just got here, and you haven’t had
time to digest all of our guideline document packet.”
“Sorry,” Falk lied. There hadn’t been much else
to do during the adjustment quarantine. The guidelines had run to several hundred thousand words,
and had been remarkably informative. They had
made it abundantly clear to Falk just how much
stonewalling was going on.
Major Fanciman was keeping his smile alight,
tending it to make sure it didn’t go out.
“There is a message, Mr Falk,” he said, “and we
like to stay on it. We like all our sponsored correspondents to stay on it too. We are a mature species,
and we no longer find it necessary to resort to crude
practices such as fighting.”
Falk leaned forward slightly.
“I understand, Major,” he said, “but isn’t this
entire situation military in nature?”
“Undeniably. We have five brigades of the Settlement Office Military Directorate boots dusty here in
Shaverton itself. Their role is entirely one of safeguard. Public safeguard.”
“But let’s just say,” said Falk, “if the public was

DAN ABNETT

7

placed in immediate threat, their role of safeguard
might require the SOMD to use its weapons?”
“True.”
“And wouldn’t that be fighting?”
“I can see why you came so highly recommended,” Fanciman said, opening a file on his desk.
“Probing questions. Incisive. Agile mind. I like it.”
“Oh good,” said Falk.
“Where are you staying, sir?” asked the driver who
Major Fanciman had summoned for Falk.
“Doesn’t matter. Where can you get a drink?”
“A bar?” the driver replied with a little halt in his
voice that suggested he thought there might be a
trick in the question.
“Where do you get a drink?” Falk asked.
“The mess, or the Cape Club sometimes.”
“Either will be fine,” Falk smiled. He closed the
vehicle door and grinned at the driver encouragingly.
“They’re both serving,” the driver replied. He
seemed uncomfortable.
“Good. I don’t want to go to a bar that isn’t
serving,” Falk said.
“No, I mean they’re both reserved for serving
personnel. You people use the Embassy or the
Holiday Inn or the GEO.”
“Me people?” asked Falk.
“Press,” said the driver. “There’s a list of clubs and
bars that correspondents can use, provided you’ve
got accreditation.”
• • •

8

EMBEDDED

Falk had accreditation. It was one of the few things
he was certain of. Most of everything else was a fuzz.
It was hard to peg time of day. His body wasn’t telling
him. He reflected that he hadn’t had a steady diurnal
rhythm in about five years, and the stay on Fiwol
with its frantic, twenty-minute days had utterly
fucked his bioclock.
It looked like it was late afternoon. The sky over
Shaverton’s glass masts, blocks and pylons looked
like a late afternoon sky. It was the colour of lemon
Turkish Delight with an icing sugar dust of clouds.
He didn’t know how long the day/night cycle was
on Eighty-Six. It wasn’t that he’d rushed his
presearch, he just wasn’t much interested in the
physical ecosystem. He’d learn that by living in it.
During acclimation, and the trip in-system on the
gradually decelerating spinrad driver, he’d studied
the political, military and social content of the
briefing packet, and any other documents he could
access. The SO was doing a more than usually
extravagant job of redacting material and neutering
news outlets, even the big networks and authorised
broadcasters.
His meeting with Major Fanciman had been
designed to deliver a specific message. The message
was: Lex Falk, you are an acclaimed correspondent
with several agency awards to your name and a
reputation for hard facts and penetrating coverage,
therefore the SO is very pleased to welcome you to
Settlement Eighty-Six, and to validate your accreditation. Having you here proves to the public back

DAN ABNETT

9

home that, despite reports of open conflict, the
Settlement Office has nothing to conceal on EightySix, and your reportage will be received as
unvarnished and credible.
You will, of course, report only what we permit
you to report.
That had been pretty much it. Fanciman had told
him all of that without expressly using any of those
actual words. Falk needed to understand it, and
needed to make it clear he understood it. If necessary, the message could be reinforced through
further meetings with SO execs more senior than
Fanciman. If really necessary, an accommodation
might be reached where the SO surrendered some
juicy nugget to Falk, something that would lend any
correspondence he filed the bat-squeak of raw truth.
One hand washes the other.
Falk sat back in the bodymould seat as the driver
turned west onto Equestrian and accelerated
towards the hazy megastructure of the Terminal. It
amused him to think that the Settlement Office had
precisely fuck all idea how uninterested he was in
any of it. He was bone-light and lagged from too
many years riding drivers, he was having trouble
finding anything he actually engaged with any more,
and heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d only agreed to the Eighty-Six commission
because the fee-with-expenses was generous by any
network standards, and the whole thing smelled just
like another Pulitzer. He had issues. He had a few
things he should have taken care of long since,
things he couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really work up the enthusiasm to

10

EMBEDDED

tackle head-on. He had a vague plan (which he’d
share with anybody who asked because it made him
sound layered) of going home, rebuilding his health
and leasing some place on the ocean for a year while
he switched gears and wrote That Novel. The
addendum he didn’t share was that he was no longer
sure what That Novel was about, or that the prospect
really didn’t get him all that fucking thrilled, though
living beside the ocean sounded nice.
Falk hadn’t warmed to Eighty-Six much. The climate
of the Shaverton region, at whatever time of whatever year it was, nudged at the comfort limits of hot
and humid. It was one of those places – and Falk had
been to a few – that wasn’t a natural fit for occupation. It was a tiny margin of variation, almost a
nuance thing, but just because the atmosphere
wasn’t technically inimical to human life, it didn’t
naturally follow that people ought to live there.
Outdoors, it was too hot in an odd way, and too
bright. There was an odd saturation to colours.
Indoors, everything was too cold. Everything
smelled of air-con and a ubiquitous, lemon-scented
twang of Insect-Aside.
The driver took him to the GEO. It was the name of
both the corp and the serious glass mast the corp
occupied in the land skirts of the massive Terminal.
From the executive offices, employees of Geoplanitia
Enabling Operator could see the heavy-hipped
ferries banging up and down out of the arrestor silos

DAN ABNETT

11

on the Cape, serving the vast drivers lurking invisibly, upstairs at the edge of space.
There was a bar in the basement, flushed with
sickly lighting, piped music and a funk of bug spray,
and fitted out with Early Settlement Era furniture,
undoubtedly repro, woven from wicker-effect
polymer lattice. The place made up in business what
it lacked in soul. There were distinct currents separating the crowd: non-local correspondents and
affiliates, sorted by old acquaintance or network
loyalty; GEO employees; locals work-ing the room,
shilling everything from sources to sex in order to
leverage a little network expense account action.
Falk got talking to a GEO exec at the rail of the
marble-effect bar. The exec was ordering a tray of
drinks. It was a colleague’s birthday. As the barman
filled the order, a casual question or two got the exec
to admit that the mood was downtrend among GEO
staffers. The dispute (even after two beer-effect
drinks, the exec was on-message enough not to refer
to the situation as a “war” or even a “conflict”) was
having non-advantageous outcomes for the corporation. Development contracts were overrunning or
remaining unfulfilled, SO grants were being withheld and GEO’s share price had dipped badly on the
home market because of public perception. GEO had
substantial holdings on Eighty-Six.
“Our share value is in the shitter,” the exec said,
“and our corporate rep is floating there right beside it.
The public thinks we’re driving this dispute through
corporate greed. It’s like Sixty all over again.”

12

EMBEDDED

“Except,” said Falk, “this isn’t a big post-global
company taking the blame for what turned out to
be fundamentalists terror-bombing settlement
pharms.”
“Fuck you know about it?” the exec asked.
“I was there.”
“On Sixty?”
“At the end, yeah.”
The exec nodded, and folded his mouth down in
a shape that indicated he was quite impressed.
“Big pharm got the blame on Sixty until it finally
came out that there was some pretty nasty activism
going on. That’s not the case here, is it? This dispute
has been triggered by the aggressive policies of corps
like GEO. Please don’t compare it to Sixty unless you
know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
The exec offered to buy Falk a drink and took
him to meet his colleagues. They were a sallow
bunch who plainly spent too much time indoors in
the tailored environment of their corporate glass
mast. Falk had never understood that. He looked like
shit because he spent too much time aboard drivers
where there was no outside to step into. But if
you’ve gone to live and work on another planet for
a five- or ten-year rotation, or forever, why the fuck
didn’t you ever go outside? Why the fuck do you
stay inside your mast? You might as well be on a
driver. You might as well have stayed in Beijing.
They wanted to know about Sixty. He gave them
a short but embellished version, romanticising his
own hardline newsman cred. They all oohed and

DAN ABNETT

13

aahed in all the right places, like they knew from
bullshit. They all nodded sagely at his tough yet
sentimental verdicts.
Three of them were due to leave in a week, six
years shy of their contracted finish. Two more were
going the following month. There were, he learned,
whole floors of the mast unoccupied. Some had
emptied since the start of the dispute, as GEO
reposted staff to other, less controversial settlements.
Others had never been filled. The GEO glass mast
had been standing for just twenty years. There was
a real possibility that it would be closed and sold off
before the corporation that had paid for its construction had properly inhabited it.
Falk listened to them rabbit. It was automatic, just
warming up his journo muscles. They weren’t saying
much that was interesting beyond the state of the
mast. They were worried about their futures, about
their careers. They were fretting about where they
might get posted, and what the bad press was doing
to their stocks and bonuses.
His Scotch-effect drink was crappy but welcome
after the abstinence of transit and acclimation. He
got a little buzz cooking and felt good about himself.
He arranged his face so it looked like he was interested.
He kept an eye on a nearby table where some
network boys had clustered. One of the faces looked
familiar, like a very old, careworn version of a man
he had once known, an older brother, a father.
“Falk? Is that you?”

14

EMBEDDED

He recognised her voice, but not her face when
he turned to look at it. She was carrying a lot of
mass, even more than she had when he’d last seen
her. Like her voice, her smile hadn’t changed.
“Cleesh.”
He got up and hugged her. His hands didn’t meet.
She smelled of nutrition bars and the sugar-plastic
aftertaste of diet control packs. There were little
flesh-match patches covering the constellations of
surgical plug excisions dotting her scalp, the side of
her throat and her slabby upper arms where they
showed beyond the sleeves of her Cola tee.
Falk hadn’t seen her since Seventy-Seven, and
even then only on screen.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’m wealthy. Really wealthy,” she laughed.
“Look at you. You unhooked.”
“Had to,” she replied, looking him up and down.
“Doctors said I had to. Can’t circle forever. Freeks®
you up. I needed grav time.”
“But circling’s what you do, Cleesh,” he said.
“I know. I’m not an in-person person. But it was
that or die, so I thought I’d spend a little time in the
company of normal gravity, drop a gazillion sizes,
make sure I don’t go cardio-pop.”
She eyed him head to toe again and grinned.
“Look at you, though, Falk. You’re like a bird.
We’re like the pedia entry for sublime and ridiculous.”
“Hey, I’m at my fucking physical peak,” he
objected.

DAN ABNETT

15

“You look like shit. But shit that I’m pleased to
see,” she replied. “Buy me a drink.”
He’d known her for years, but the core of their relationship was a sixteen month assignment to
Seventy-Seven. Cleesh was a data wet nurse,
feeding, supplying and managing the newslines from
a can station circling at twenty-nine miles. She was
the most able and clued-in editor-engineer he’d ever
worked with. They’d become friends, but he’d never
met her in the flesh. She never unhooked from the
plug network and left her no-grav home. Prolonged
no-grav fucked you up, sooner or later. It made you
bone-light or flesh-heavy, sometimes both. No
matter how well sunlight, clean air, fresh water and
food were simulated, they were still simulated, and
it poisoned you eventually. Diabetes, SAD, muscle
wastage, organ failure, obesity, eczema, there was
always some kind of price.
They talked. He became aware of how twigscrawny his wrists were compared to hers. Perhaps
he had been riding the drivers too long.
“You’re here to cover the thing that isn’t a war?”
she asked.
“Of course.”
“You got an in? They’re freeking® tight about the
press free-associating with servicemen.”
“I’ve got a hot ticket pass,” he said. He took a sip
of his Scotch-effect. “Settlement Office accreditation.
Access.”
“Of course you have,” she smiled. It was the

16

EMBEDDED

friendly, reassuring smile he’d seen via hi-res boxes
a million times.
“They’ve arranged some visits for me. I saw some
SOMD desker.” He brushed his palms together, lit up
the tiny screen of his celf and opened the document
Fanciman had posted him.
“Two days’ time, a look at Mitre Sands, then a
visit to Marblehead.” He showed her the celf’s little
display in the cup of his hand.
Cleesh pursed her lips and wobbled her head
from side to side.
“What?” he asked.
“That’ll just be handled PR stuff. Mitre Sands is a
pretend camp they use to show everyone.”
“It’s not pretend.”
Cleesh was drinking a tall glass of NoCal-Cola.
She turned the glass by the rim with her thumb and
fingers like she was cracking a safe.
“Okay, but it’s a stores dump, dressed up to make
people feel like they’re visiting something authentic.
Marblehead, that was hot, just not any more. It’s
tourism, Falk. They’ll show you a wall with hardround holes in it. They show it to everyone. Four
days’ time, you’ll be sitting here telling me how they
showed you the wall with the hard-round holes in it.”
“That’s always how it works,” he replied. “You
follow their tours around at the beginning while you
find your feet, then you give the guide the slip. You
know that.”
“Tougher here,” she said. “Freeking® tough.”
“You’ve come here to report?”

DAN ABNETT

17

“Yeah. Makes a change. I thought, if Falk can do
it, how hard can it be? They’re not letting anyone
close to the good stuff. There’s a lot of people doing
a lot of graft on the down low to get access.”
“A lot of people including you?”
“But of course.”
“Have you got something, Cleesh?”
She gave him her stern look.
“I’ve been here three months, Falk. I’ve worked
something out and it could be good. It’s almost in the
bag. I might share it with you, except you’ll probably
be here three minutes and get something better.”
“Come on, Cleesh.”
“Be patient. Work your magic. What I’ve got isn’t
guaranteed or anything. And if it boils over, it could
get me rescinded forever.”
“It’s that dodgy?”
She shrugged. “I will spend the rest of my years
teaching elementary ling to grade school settlementeers. Or in jail.”
“Give me something,” he said. “What do you
know? Is the Bloc really involved in this, or is it just
a corporate shooting match?”
She dropped her voice and leaned forward.
“It might actually be the Bloc this time, Falk,” she
said.

TWO
He was a good boy. He stayed in Shaverton for the
next two days, and didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t step off. He walked boulevards that were so prosaically planned their
designerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lack of imagination was as plain as the
rows of palm-effect trees. He drank iced tea and
NoCal-Cola under the glare shades of terrace diners,
and watched the flitters and bugs droning through
the sunlight. The biggest bugs were known as blurds.
They were about the size of sparrows, and extremely
common. They fluttered about like delicate pieces of
folded paper engineering.
On the second day, he had lunch with Cleesh at
a ProFood outlet on the north end of the Cape road.
They sat near a big plastic statue of Booster Rooster.
She brought a couple of people with her: a woman
called Sylvane who was a stringer from NetWorth,
and a nondescript man that Cleesh claimed worked
for SO Logistics. Falk wondered if the man was her
contact, and tried to open him up a little, but he was
singularly dull and unforthcoming, and spent most
18

DAN ABNETT

19

of the time talking to Sylvane about import tariffs.
“You know they named Seventy-Seven?” Cleesh
asked Falk.
“Officially? I hadn’t heard that.”
“Yup. They called it Fronteria.”
“That makes it what? A settlement? A full state?”
“A full state.”
“Wow.”
“One hundred and thirteenth state of the Union,”
she said.
“It’ll always be Seventy-Seven to me,” he said.
“Who the fuck thought of Fronteria?”
“I know,” she agreed, “it’s a freeking® awful
name, right?”
“What’s with this ‘freeking’ thing?” he asked,
putting down his wrap.
“Sponsored expletive,” said Sylvane.
“It’s what?”
Sylvane was good-looking enough, but it was
camera-ready attractive. There was no depth to her
appeal. It was all shopped and cosmetic.
“The SO wants to control bad language on all
broadcasts,” Sylvane said, “especially if stuff is going
to the US networks free-feed. They were going to
patch in a bleep-mask to cover any cussing.”
“Then NoCal-Cola stepped up and offered to
sponsor an expletive for use in the zone,” said
Cleesh. “Freek®. Like in NoCal Freek®, the limeflavoured hi-caff one. Didn’t they offer to patch you
when you got here?”
“No,” said Falk.

20

EMBEDDED

“I told you he was special,” Cleesh said to the
others.
“They actually plugged it into you?” Falk asked,
uneasy.
“Ling patch,” said Cleesh. “It’s a permit requirement for anyone from Associated or the indies.
Keeping it clean across the networks.”
“That’s how you’re making that little sound at the
end of the word?” Falk asked.
“It’s freeking® amazing, isn’t it?” said Cleesh,
doing it deliberately, with relish. “I spent the first few
days swearing my freeking® ass off, and I can’t say
freek® all except the sponsored word.”
“None of you can actually curse any more?” Falk
asked, laughing.
“Nope,” Cleesh replied. Sylvane shook her head.
“Say fuck!” he demanded.
“Freek®!” said Cleesh.
“I don’t want to,” said Sylvane.
“No one patched me,” said the man from Logistics. “I think harsh language is the mark of a limited
imagination.”
“Screw that,” said Falk. “Whatever happened to
free speech?”
“This is free speech,” said Cleesh. “I didn’t have
to pay for the patch.”
“I meant your constitutional right as a citizen of
the United Status,” said Falk.
“That’s what I’m freeking® talking about, baby,”
she said.
• • •

DAN ABNETT

21

On the morning of his first arranged tour, he was
required to report to the depot at Camp Lasky on
Shaverton’s south shore two hours before dawn. He
got transport down and arrived in good time, but he
felt like crap. He couldn’t sync to the day/night cycle.
Lag had got him. He was wide awake in the middle
of the night, and hungry for something he couldn’t
specifically identify. He had spent too much of the
previous evening sinking Scotch-effect at the GEO
bar in an attempt to feel drowsy while trying to talk
Sylvane into bed. The latter was a purely academic
exercise. He didn’t especially want to sleep with her.
He wanted to sleep with somebody. He wasn’t that
fussy. It was part of his hunger. He let her say the no
he was expecting, and told himself it was useful sparring to get himself back in the ring.
Wake-up felt disgustingly early. Falk felt as
though someone had folded the night in half. He’d
managed to catch about half an hour’s sleep in the
end, and his head was raw from too much Scotcheffect. It never got much better, despite some pills
and a bottle of water.
The transport dropped him and two other correspondents at the gate, under the blue-white floods.
Blurds were battering themselves insensible against
the mesh covers on the lamps.
The other two correspondents looked refreshed
and well equipped. He felt shoddy and rough. He
wondered if they could smell his breath. Fuck them
if they could.
Two SOMD shaveheads in tundra-pattern kit

22

EMBEDDED

checked their credentials and let them in through
the barrier to a waiting area beside the loading docks.
A female warrant officer called Tedders came to find
them. She checked their credentials again, and made
them bag their celf plugs and any other transmitting
devices. The poly bags, labelled and signed for, went
into lockers.
“You’re going to be embedded for the sweep tour
from Mitre Sands,” she said. “We can’t have an unsecured live signal coming off any of you.” One of the
other two produced a pen tablet and asked her if that
was okay. She spent a moment checking it over. She
was small and robust, with sleeves folded up to her
elbows and her hair in a tight bun as small and hard
as a grenade.
“How are you today, sir?” she asked when it was
Falk’s turn to be swept.
“I’m wealthy, thank you,” he replied. He got his
game face on, notched up the charm.
“Good to hear,” she said. There was a look in her
eyes, the way she regarded him, that suggested he
was special-handling cargo she’d had notice of.
“You’ve been told to expect me, haven’t you?” he
asked.
“I do my job, sir. I read my presearch. I see I’m
going to be hosting a guy who’s got press awards
over his fireplace, I take it seriously.”
“I don’t bite,” he said.
“I don’t get bitten,” she replied. Her smile was
firm, non-negotiable. Then her expression changed
slightly, became more agreeable. “Sit out the debrief

DAN ABNETT

23

if you like. I’m sure we won’t be telling the likes of
you anything new.”
“The likes of me would like to hear it anyway,”
he said. “It’s part of the embedding experience.
Besides, I don’t want them resenting me for getting
special treatment.”
He nodded his head in the direction of the other
two correspondents.
“Okay then,” Tedders said.
Four other agency reps had already assembled in
the office space behind the waiting area. Like the two
who’d come in with Falk, they looked packet-fresh
and eager. He wanted tea, maybe some variety of
baked goods, and twenty minutes by himself in a
clean latrine. He felt like an old, notorious uncle
who’d turned up at a wedding.
“Major Selton,” Tedders announced. Selton
stepped up, fronting the room. She was a she too, a
long-wheelbase Amazon compared to the portable,
compact Tedders. Her fatigues had creases that could
draw blood. Her hair was a black lawn, mown short.
The overhead lights, unflatteringly hard, glinted off
the digital brooch at her throat.
“Welcome to Lasky,” she said, “I hope you’re all
good and wealthy this morning. The SOMD wants
to make your visit comfortable and safe, but I want
to make sure you’ve all signed your permission
waivers. My colleague, Warrant Officer Tedders, will
have been through the prechecks, but I want to
stress again that if you’re carrying anything that
transmits, you need to turn it in now. All our

24

EMBEDDED

connections need to be secure. If you don’t know, if
you’re uncertain, be safe and ask.”
She moved closer to the large wall box, and the
proximity of her brooch woke it up. A test pattern
colour card came up first, then the SOMD crest logo
against a blue background. She was still talking.
“Settlement Eighty-Six was first developed one
hundred ten years ago during the Second Expansion.
It has always been a high-productivity location, with
specialisms that include agriculture, mineral sourcing,
bulk manufacture and orbital assembly. Notable insystem resources include Eighty-Six’s second moon,
86/b, locally known as ‘Fred’. Page three of your
packs. Fred has the third highest concentration of
extro-transition elements in settled territory.”
The wall box opened a complex, rotating plan of
Eighty-Six and the mechanism of the stellar system
that supported it. Fred was highlighted.
“Forty-four years ago,” Selton continued, “the
Settlement Office formally declared all Northern
Territories of Eighty-Six as the jurisdiction of the
United Status, acknowledging the US’s claims of
sustained investment in, and support of, the
Northern Territory settlements. This was ratified two
years later. Nineteen small territorial parcels in the
southern and subpolar zones remain outside United
Status dominion. Seven are independent commercial
outsearch stations. The others are agricultural fiefs
of the Central Bloc.”
Topographs and geopolitical sat-maps of EightySix rolled across the wall box, with little hot, bright

DAN ABNETT

25

data-markers appearing and disappearing very fast,
each one shooting a tag spear down to some surface
detail before it vanished. Selton slowed the map
rotation with a hand stroke.
“The Northern Territories appealed for full statehood a decade ago. We’re in work with the usual
long, slow programme of discovery and interestconflict assessment. The SO has supported the claim,
and expects that Eighty-Six will be approved for full
state status within five years.”
“Presumably unless this war gets in the way?”
asked a correspondent in the front row.
Oooh! Don’t interrupt her! Falk winced. And don’t
say war!
Selton didn’t miss a beat. She looked at the correspondent, a girl in a puffy, green litex hiking jacket,
and fired off a ground-to-air laser-led public relations
smile. Falk felt the girl incinerate.
“The situation here on Eighty-Six may force a
revision of that estimate,” Selton said smoothly. “It
does not, however, have direct relevance to the
pending statehood process.”
“But surely–” the girl continued.
Fuck me, learn to drop it! Falk thought. In God’s
name, stop baiting her!
He stuck his hand up.
“That will make Eighty-Six the what?” he asked.
“The one hundred and fourteenth state of the
Union?”
“One-fourteen or one-fifteen,” Selton replied,
acknowledging him with an agreeable smile. “It

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depends whether Sixty-Six fast-tracks its statehood
legislation or not.”
“What will Eighty-Six be called?” Falk asked.
“We don’t know. That hasn’t yet been decided.”
“But formal naming usually accompanies the
declaration of statehood.”
“Of course. I mean, we’re not in the loop. I
believe some names are being audience-tested for a
shortlist. That’s not my bailiwick. You’d have to ask
the SO direct.”
“Thanks,” said Falk, and pretended to make a
note. The girl in the green hiker definitely owed him
big for easing the heat off her.
“We expect to be out for about fourteen hours
today. The weather’s looking clear along the
seaboard, so we should make good time into the
mountain zone. We transfer from hopter to ground
roller for the last leg. I’m going to buddy each one of
you up with a member of the sweep unit. You can
ask them questions, but you will, and I stress will,
follow their instructions at all times. This is a potential firezone, so there is a present danger of death.
Follow instructions. Do not deviate. We do not
expect trouble, but if trouble starts, we cannot have
you making it worse.”
“Don’t mention it,” Falk said.
The girl in the green hiker looked at him.
“Mention what?” she asked.
“Me taking that bullet for you.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. She

DAN ABNETT

27

clearly wasn’t amused or impressed. Irritation
creases bunched at the bridge of her nose.
They were outside, doing up their jackets and
spraying on Insect-Aside, waiting for the unit. The
sun was coming up.
“Selton was going to scorch you,” said Falk.
“I asked a legitimate question,” the girl replied.
“That was what it was, was it?” He laughed.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked.
“Falk,” he said.
“I know what the fuck I’m doing, Falk,” she said.
“How many days of subtlety school did you miss,
growing up?” he asked.
“Fuck!” she said, backing away. “I don’t know
what this is. Are you coming on to me? You’re being
weird.”
She walked away.
“Smooth,” said Tedders. She was standing right
there beside him.
“Some people don’t know when you’re doing
them a favour,” he said.
“I hear you,” said Tedders.
“Who is she?” he asked. She consulted her celf.
“Noma Berlin. Affiliated Dispersal. Says she’s got
a short-term contract with Data-Scatter.”
“Rookie,” he murmured.
“She’s young, she’ll learn,” said Tedders.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Falk asked.
“The ‘she’ll learn’ part?” asked Tedders. “Or the
‘she’s young’ part?”
He shook his head like it was all a joke and he

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didn’t care. The compact, portable smile didn’t leave
Tedders’ lips.
“Are you coming with us, Tedders?” he asked.
“Today?” she replied. “No. Thank fuck.”
Selton called everyone to order. The rising sun was
already notching the heat up, and the air was
swirling with tiny bugs. She ran through a few more
pointers, took a question or two and then led them
across to the hangars.
In the interval since the brief, she’d strapped on
body armour plates and a torso harness the colour
of putty. There was some kind of short-action
sidearm holster-packed on her left hip.
The hangars were vast, airy spaces out of the
heat. A row of big, matt-grey transport hopters sat
facing the north doors. C440s, bleeding-edge
machines, intended to impress. The blades of their
turbofans were neatly folded like the buds of
photonastic flowers waiting for the sun.
Beside each hopter, groups of SOMD servicemen
were suiting up from kit sets laid out on the deck in
identical patterns. They were all big guys, even the
ones that were girls. They wore the same style
tundra-pattern field dress and armour harness rigs
as Selton. They were intimidatingly clean and
precise. Each kit layout included a principal weapon,
reverentially resting on a ground sheet. The most
common issue was the heavy, black M3A Hardlaser
(beam) Emitter, known as the pipe or piper, though
some mission specialists carried more compact PAP

DAN ABNETT

29

20s loading 2mil SOMD Standard Caseless in stocklock clips. Falk could smell gun oil and anti-dust
lube.
“Falk?”
One of the specialists had approached him. He
was seriously tall, and bulked out by his harness
plates. The high and tight made his head seem overlarge.
“You Falk?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The specialist held out his hand.
“Renn Lukes, payload specialist. I’m going to be
your buddy.”

THREE
The hopters blatted downcountry, low and determined, riding the rush of their howling chop-wash.
Through the open side door, Falk watched their
shadow chasing them across the terrain, matching
them in a perfect parallel trajectory, sometimes big,
as volcanic crags thrust up, sometimes flickering in
the salt-gorse, sometimes abruptly small and distant
as low dune basins dropped away.
Lukes re-checked Falk’s harness.
“Don’t want you falling out,” he said. His voice,
half-drowned by the fan-jets, echoed itself with a
tinny delay via the com-plug in Falk’s left ear. The
payload specialist’s voice was being chased by its
own fuzzy shadow, just like the hopter.
There were eight other SOMD servicemen in the
hold space, and two other correspondents. One was
a technology reporter from thInc, a beardy little
nuisance called Jeanot. The other was green hiker
girl.
Lukes finished another stow check, and crossed
30

DAN ABNETT

31

the deck with the spread gait of a man inured to
swell and pitch. He used overhead grip rails with
unconscious ease, strap-hanging like a commuter.
“What can I tell you?” he asked.
Falk shrugged.
Lukes buckled in beside him.
“Major Selton says we should answer all your
questions, demonstrate practice, give you the talkaround.”
“That’s why we’re here,” said Falk.
Lukes smiled and pinched his fingers and thumb
together gently like they were an adjustable wrench.
“You don’t have to shout,” he said. “I can hear
you fine.”
“Sorry.”
“You want to know about the bird?” Lukes
offered. “Standard SOMD gunship and workhorse.
We call them Boomers.”
“C440 Avery Boreal,” Jeanot cut in from his seat
nearby. “Quad-engined utility and assault lifters,
affectionately known as ‘Boomers’ or ‘Boombirds’, a
basic retool of the long-serving C400 platform with
new-generation instrumentation packages and
dermetic-weave six-ply fuselage sheathing. Fabricated by GEO and Lowmann-Escaper Systems under
licence from Avery Daimler Eiser. Forty thousand
pound capacity. Top speed two hundred seventy-five
knots.”
Lukes laughed heartily.
“There’s almost no point you being here,” Falk
said to Jeanot.

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“You know your stuff,” said Lukes, still amused.
“Test me,” Jeanot laughed back. “What else do
you want to know? Range is nine-thirty nmi, rate of
climb is twenty-two hundred feet per minute, disc
loading is sixteen pounds per square foot. All homestandard figures, of course. This is the Egress variant
with the boosted–”
“No,” said Falk.
They both looked at him.
“It’s the Echo version. Those aren’t Lycoming
plants. The nacelles are too bulked up. They’re T490
Northrop cold fusion units.”
“Good eye,” said Lukes, laughing again.
“Good engines,” said Falk.
“You were hiding your inner nerd,” chuckled
Lukes.
“Unlike some,” said Falk. He returned Jeanot’s
toxic glare and mouthed fuck you.
Outside, it was hard to see far. The sky was the
colour and texture of steel wool, and it felt like they
were swathed in dusty heat. You could see how hot
the day was, how close.
You could see how dreary and endless the land
was under the skipping, flickering shadow in mindless pursuit.
They set down at Mitre Sands, on a mesa above the
camp strip. As the jets whined down to rotor stall,
they de-bussed with their heads down.
Scarves of dust trailed the air. The sky was
diffused heat and sour light, too hot, too bland. Falk

DAN ABNETT

33

slipped out his glares and put them on. He keyed the
snapshot function on the left arm so that he could
blink-record photo notes as and when.
The light felt abrasive on his face. There was a
prickle of storm static that he could taste on top of
the grit in his mouth. The sky over the flat hill was
simultaneously too big and too close. It was intimidating them with a ski mask on. He wanted to cough
and spit to clear the dust from his throat, but felt selfconscious. Spitting somehow seemed too
provocative and disrespectful. Falk decided it was the
bullying sky he was cowed by, not the virile SOMD
servicemen.
Desert blurds, white as bleached bone and as big
as his hand, chittered by. He brushed himself down,
hoisted his carrypack, and blinked off a few of shots
while everybody caught up. He got a couple of nice
snaps of the boomers parked in a row, and two of
green hiker girl bending over to do up her laces. The
saved images stayed on the inside of his glare lenses
for a moment before fading.
They went down the slope into the camp. It was
a village of crate-and-create box huts and reflatable
hardskin store domes. Dust blow had scuffed all the
surface paint. SOMD staffers were waiting to greet
them. Falk could see a row of Fargos and other roller
rides parked beyond the genny shed and the uplink
masts. At the defensive points of the camp strip,
SOMD gunners manned autohunt gun carriages.
Falk watched one reposition, plodding on its stocky
tortoise legs. The fat muzzle shrouds of its four mated

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pipers had been painted white to reduce their profile
against the sky.
Selton went to meet the camp rep and they
started to chat. Another officer directed the media
party and their SOMD buddies towards a sideless
aluminium frame hut where materiel boxes were
stacked under netting.
“Time to plate you,” Lukes said to Falk. “What do
you wear? A thirty-six?”
“Forty, forty-two,” said Falk. Did Lukes think he
was some kind of shrimp?
Lukes looked at him. “Maybe we start with a
thirty-eight. It’s got to fit tight, or it won’t stop a
freeking® thing.”
The servicemen started to unpack body armour
and torso rigs from the boxes. The kit was putty
coloured the same as theirs, but it had “PRESS”
printed in giant block white across the chests and
shoulder blades. Falk wondered if they should have
just cut to the chase and printed on the words “aim
here” instead. Lukes helped him strap up.
“Marblehead really a firezone, or is this to lend
authentic flavour?” Falk asked as he adjusted the
waist fasteners.
“It can be lively,” Lukes replied. “Probably won’t
be, but returning media observers to Lasky with
sucking chest wounds because we didn’t insist they
wear rigs doesn’t play well.”
“Has that happened?”
“No, because we insist they wear rigs.”
“You’re US, right?”

DAN ABNETT

35

Lukes nodded.
“How far into your SO attachment are you?”
“Year two of a four-year tour. Most of us are US,
but there’s a great Chinese brigade up at Thompson
Ten.”
“I wondered if we would get any Bloc forces in
our escort.”
Lukes grinned.
“It’s always a possibility,” he said.
“But?”
“The possibility is technical. In practice, certain
unspoken policies apply.”
“Bloc forces on SO attachment would not supply
cover for US media on Eighty-Six?”
“I said the policies were unspoken. I don’t make
them. I don’t speak them.”
“Is this a fight against Bloc forces?” Falk asked.
Lukes took back the gloves he’d just passed to
Falk and exchanged them for a smaller pair.
“Anti-corporate paramilitary forces are staging
armed resistance to the territorial interests of the
United Status,” he said. “The Settlement Office Military Directorate has been engaged to police and
contain the dispute.”
“That sounds like something you read off a
prompter.”
“Ain’t it a bitch when the truth comes as no
surprise?” Lukes replied. He slapped Falk on the
back. “You’re done.”
Falk flexed his shoulders and circled his arms.
“Good,” he said. “I told you. Forty-two.”

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“That’s a thirty-six,” said Lukes.
The rollers had their engines running ready, throbbing idle revs into the morning heat. Most of the
rides were big six-wheel Fargo models spray-jobbed
with tundra paint mottle, but there were two small
Smartkart All-ways that would act as follow cars.
Lukes led Falk to the front Fargo and showed him
his seat. The specialist was carrying his M3A on a
mesh sling over his right shoulder. The weapon
seemed to sport an unnecessarily complex cluster of
tactical optics on the top rail. The muzzle shroud
covering the emitter’s tube looked grotesquely wide,
like a section of black plastic drainpipe.
Falk discovered he had been placed behind Major
Selton, who was strapped into the centreline
command seat.
“The general wisdom seems to be that the paramilitaries are landgrabbers,” he remarked.
“It’s a time-worn story, and Eighty-Six isn’t the
first settlement to experience the problem,” she
replied. “It won’t be the last.”
“What is it? Independence? Rejection of US
dominion? Territorial ethics? Legal right to
worship?”
“That’s quite a list,” she said over her shoulder,
busy listening to her com-plug while she addressed
her drop-down tactical display.
“It could be longer,” said Falk. “A source told me
that the Reserve Bank had reneged on the agreed
scale for parcel subsidies for first- and second-

DAN ABNETT

37

generation settlers.”
“Not true,” she said.
“I also heard that mineral rights had been revised
and cut to a one hundred and one year review.”
“That is true,” she said, “but hardly material. The
chances of any parcel tenant losing their mineral
rights after review is very small. The review period
has really just been reset to assist with the SO’s
ongoing resource audit. The only circumstances in
which a parcel tenant would forfeit their mineral
rights at point of review would be if the lode
involved fell within the remit of a Strategic Significance Order.”
“Well, I also heard–” he began.
“How long does this list get, Mr Falk?” she asked
him, smiling. “Just so I can block out my afternoon.”
He held her look.
“I guess it’ll get longer and longer all the while
the specific nature of the dispute remains vague.
Speculation grows wild, especially since this is the
first full-scale shooting war to take place post-globally since settlement began. That comes with the
words big deal stamped on it.”
“If this is what a full-scale shooting war looks
like,” said Selton, “we haven’t got much to worry
about. This is a minor armed dispute. I don’t think
it’s the big story you think it is. We’ve got it
contained. It’ll be over in a couple of months.”
“You don’t think it’s the big story I think it is, or
you don’t think it’s the big story us media types
think it is?”

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“I meant the latter, Mr Falk,” she replied. “Why,
is your imagination particularly feverish?”
Something crackled in her ear. She signalled the
driver up front and they started to roll. The Fargo
immediately began to lurch and rumble over the
rough terrain. It felt and sounded like every single
one of the fat tyres had blown and shredded.
“Everyone always wonders about the Central
Bloc,” Falk said.
Selton shot him a glance. He couldn’t tell if it was
a nervous look or a pitying one.
“The Cold War’s been cold for nearly three
hundred years, Falk. As we move out and expand,
all it ever does is get colder and colder. Hard space
sucks all the warmth out of it. We were at close quarters when it started, sharing one world, and still it
started cold. It must be approaching heat death by
now.”
“Poetic. Can I quote you?”
“Sure. We’ve put plenty of space between us,
Falk. Literally. The US, the Bloc, the Chinese,
everyone’s got room to breathe, to develop. No one’s
treading on anyone else’s toes any more. No one gets
to seem like a bad neighbour. There’s no reason for
war, cold or otherwise.”
“But you’d agree,” said Falk, “if we suddenly
found one, that would be a huge hairy deal?”
“None hairier,” she replied, flashing her eyebrows
at him. “But that is not the situation on Eighty-Six.
It’s a local settlement dispute with disaffected paramilitaries.”

DAN ABNETT

39

“Where do the paramilitaries get their arms
from?” asked green hiker girl from the bucket seat
behind Falk. Falk hadn’t realised she’d been
listening.
Selton said something in reply, then turned to
check something on her display’s terrain scanner.
“What did she say?” green hiker girl asked over
the thunder of the engines.
“I think she said ‘that’s not material’,” Falk
replied.

FOUR
A short distance out of Mitre Sands, on the open
track, the Fargos rose up on their suspension and
went what Lukes called “long-legged”. Lifting the
hull and broadening the chassis frame made for
superior clearance and weight distribution, and the
extended footprint boosted stability. The ride got
appreciably smoother.
Through the dust-worn side window, Falk
watched the All-ways riding out wide alongside
them across the stone scrub, lifting plumes of dust
like foam wakes. The chase cars were light and fast.
Sunlight flashed off the glares of the shavehead
manning the heavy-gauge pintle mount.
Mountains sulked to the west of them like a grey
barn wall. For an hour, the cloudcover came and went
like time-lapse footage: cloud boil, sharp sun breaks,
cloud boil again. Over the shared com system, Selton
drew their attention to a pair of the big, rare tundra
grazers, turning on the thermals, but Falk didn’t get
to the window in time and all he saw were sun dogs.
40

DAN ABNETT

41

He was uncomfortable in his seat. It was tight,
and the hard form-mould transmitted every bump
and vibration to his ass. His back and his right hip
began to ache.
Green hiker girl was writing something on a
clutch tablet.
“This your first zone posting?” he asked her,
trying to reboot things.
“I’m thirty-one,” she replied.
He gave her “quizzical”.
“Are we playing Respond To One Question With
The Answer To Another?” he asked.
“I’m not playing anything with you, period,” she
replied. She returned to her work.
“The longer I spend with you,” he said, “the more
I sense I’m getting to know the real you.”
She looked up at him again. He considered
himself thick-skinned, but the contempt in her eyes
came as a surprise.
“I have a horrible feeling,” she said, “that
someone once told you that you were charming, and
you believed them.”
Marblehead was an ore town that had been seeded
about fifty years before. The first-gen pop, according
to Selton, had been mostly Chinese and Portuguese,
though that had diluted as the town’s prosperity had
grown. The place had secured major contracts to
supply ore for the construction industry, mainly blue
metal aggregate for precast concrete mixes, though
it also quarried quality materials for facing and

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dressing. The extractors of Marblehead had made a
significant contribution to the rise of Shaverton.
Marblehead had been one of the flashpoints in
the early phase of the dispute. Production had cut
back as the SOMD restricted transport and
conveyance. A lot of the pop had drained out in the
previous nine months.
Selton told them that the op profile was to meet
with a Forward Patrol Group, conduct a security
appraisal and then extract before nightfall. Falk was
pretty sure that was just a bunch of rugged-sounding
terms that actually meant a pretend wargame exercise with added show-and-tell.
Approaching the town, now driving on a hardpan
roadway, they dropped their profile again, and ran
low. The All-ways tucked in close. One zipped ahead,
taking point.
“Stay buttoned up,” Selton said into her mic.
Their speed had decreased. “Authority given for
weapons live. Commence standard sweep and target
sampling.”
There was a disconcerting noise of motor gearing
in the roof above them. The autohunt turret mount
on the Fargo’s cabin top activated and began to
traverse.
They entered a long incline, a winding ribbon
road that followed the side of a valley down to the
town limits. The place looked nondescript, dirty and
dead, not so much a township as row after row of
ugly precast buildings dumped on waste ground
waiting to be shipped out on flatbeds to permanent

DAN ABNETT

43

homes. Places were shuttered and boarded, screened
by chainlink and mesh sheeting, painted with pollution, stained by sunlight and finished off with the
fine detail of graffiti scrawled by the bored, the indolent, the dispossessed, the township youth, the
out-of-a-job migrants, the contract-less miners. East
of the town were the vast land scars of the open-cast
mines and the quarries, lunar landscapes of stepsided pits like negative spaces created by pressing
ziggurats tip-down into soft clay. Each pit was big
enough to hold the town itself. Spoil heaps and
outfill had formed new mountains. Rusty orange
bulk excavators, dump trucks and mass conveyer
assemblies made it look like a sand box abandoned
by children for fear of rain. The quarries were barer,
their sides scraped back to pale, grained rock, like
exposed bone.
North of the town lay the precast plants, the
curing works and the functionally ugly blast furnaces
used to process byproduct. Near to these monstrosities sprawled the loading docks and the immense
shipping parks where bulk roadliners that hadn’t
made the coast highway run regularly for almost two
years slumbered under grimy weather wraps.
“Seems delightful,” said Falk.
“I’ve been looking to summer here,” said Lukes.
They reached the edge of town and followed the
road through three or more sets of wire gates that
were wide open and seemed to have no purpose
beyond the sculptural. Fuel drums weighted with set
concrete dotted the roadlane, along with other trash

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like fence posts and some buckled signage, a
makeshift slalom course to slow the advance of
anything short of an MBT. The convoy steered
around the obstructions, keeping line, bleeding little
speed.
“Where is everyone?” asked Jeanot, peering out
and recording footage with a tablet.
“There’s a curfew,” replied Selton, her attention
primarily focused on her displays.
“It’s late morning,” said green hiker girl.
“It’s a strict curfew,” said Falk.
Something on Selton’s display pinged. For a
second, Falk felt himself tense up instinctively.
“Contact signal,” said Selton, and typed something into a text pane.
Fucking dope, Falk admonished himself. You actually bought into it.
The FPG was coming out to meet them.
The members of the Forward Patrol Group were
driving in Fargos of their own, and they had a fat,
armoured Longpig gunbus as the centrepiece of their
motorcade. The vehicles, and the SOMD troopers
riding in them, were caked in air-blown dirt. Their
kit was a little bit more personalised and non-reg
than the fresh-on-this-morning look being worked by
Selton and her unit. Their rollers came to a halt,
engines running, in a little fan behind the rumbling
self-propelled, laid out like playing cards wiped across
a table. Troopers with pipers and RPG thumpers
dismounted and locked off the thoroughfare,

DAN ABNETT

45

shoulders tight to stocks, cheeks to top rails, eyes to
optics, fingers resting ready on trigger guards. The
gunbus, twice the size of a Fargo, reminded Falk of
some creature from a bestiary, a traveller’s excited
fabulation of a rhinoceros or a warthog. It was broad
and fat, lethargic and ill-tempered. It sat heavily on
its broad treads with anti-rocket armour skirts
hanging down around its wheel hubs. It was almost
black with grime. The M190 howitzer slanted at the
sky like a unicorn’s horn, vulgarly big, rendered
preposterous by the massive, fluted, vented muzzle
brake at the end of the barrel. The brake lent the
whole machine an unpleasant fetishistic air.
The commander of the column was an SOMD
major called LaRue. He and Selton chatted for a
while, then he ambled over to greet the media crew.
He seemed real to Falk, genuine. Falk wondered if
he might actually have cynically overestimated the
show-and-tell factor. He got the tingle of tension
back, the feeling that he was actually in some
fucker’s crosshairs after all. LaRue looked like
someone who’d been leading an FPG in the field for
six weeks. He spoke like it. His body language was
unmannered and tired. There was nothing scripted
or autocued about what he said.
He told them that the FPG was about to conduct
a room-by-room of Number Two Blast Furnace,
following a tip-off from one of the labour watch
teams. A forced entry overnight had lit a red light on
the site foreman’s security display. Selton’s unit and
the correspondents were welcome to accompany the

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FPG for the duration of the operation, provided that
they followed FPG instructions explicitly and didn’t
get in what LaRue gently described as “the fucking
way”.
Unpatched, thought Falk. Unreconstructed.
Dropping the pitch of his voice, LaRue issued a
bald statement about the risks. Shots might be fired.
There might be full-on contact. Their lives would be
in danger, despite the body-plate and the SOMD
presence. Even if they followed every syllable, every
letter of the instructions, there was still a chance that
any one of them could get scorched. LaRue wanted
them to know that. He didn’t want anyone operating
under the illusion that this wasn’t the real deal. The
real fucking deal, as he put it.
Anyone could duck out, no problem. They could
stay under guard with the rollers, or be taken to a
strongpoint to wait for the others. No one would be
judged.
“Think about it for a minute,” he said. “To be
honest, I’d be happier if none of you came. It makes
our job easier. But I will accommodate you. Think
about it, then have a word with my staff sergeant
here if you want to be included.”
Falk felt an odd heat rising inside him. Tension
and fear, a blend he hadn’t tasted in a long time. Of
course he was going to get himself included. Things
had just got interesting. The most interesting thing
of all was his unbidden response. He was excited. He
was scared. He felt cynicism peeling off him like
onion skin. He didn’t want to get shot. Now there

DAN ABNETT

47

was a chance he could. He felt sore from the ride,
nauseous from the night before and sick with trepidation. He was amazed at how upbeat these crappy
physiological responses made him feel.
“Oh, there’s something I want to show you,”
LaRue added. “Crazy. You’ll love it. It’ll give you a
little perspective while you’re making up your
minds.”
Escorted by a bunch of troopers carrying their
primary weapons ready across their chests, LaRue
walked the media correspondents a little way back
down the roadway, and then off onto the dirt, into
the yard behind a derelict construction works.
“There,” he said. He said it with pride, like he was
a breeder parading a prize-winning steer, or the
patriarch at a bris.
He was showing them a wall. It was peppered
with hard-round holes from small-arms fire.
“Un-freeking-believable,” murmured Falk.

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by Dan Abnett
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UK/RoW: April 2011
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Triumff: Her Majestyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hero

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